The effect of the human hand over the
electromagnetic behavior of handset antennas is an
important
aspect that should be taken into account. In this r
egard, the
finger loading is a critical issue since it may det
une the input
impedance as well as decrease the efficiency. To ov
ercome such
effects, an array of several small handset antennas
is proposed, in
particular, an array of two elements and other with
three
elements distributed along the ground plane of a ha
ndset wireless
device. The finger loading effect over several posi
tions is
experimentally analyzed using a phantom hand in the
824-
960MHz frequency region where several communication
s
standards are allocated (e.g. GSM850 and GSM900). T
he
experiments reveal that the array with three elemen
ts presents
higher robustness to the finger loading effect fulf
illing, at the
same time, the size constraints imposed by handset
platforms.